This article unravels the careful encodings contained in the final sentence, the sphragis, of Longus’ novel Daphnis and Chloe. Building on previous studies on the ending, I delve more deeply into each of the key terms included in the final sentence and argue for the presence of New Comedy as the key complement to Bucolic in the novel’s generic hybridity. I focus on Chloe’s role as focalizer of the final sentence, and through key intratextual and intertextual resonances of the sphragis (...) argue that the novel’s generic games are bound up above all in her experience and educational development. (shrink)

An influential position in the scholarship on Longus is that the narrator of Daphnis and Chloe is dissociated from, and ironized by, the author. Two articles by John Morgan, in particular, have propounded this interpretation. Morgan argues that Longus’ narrator relates the story with simplicity and naivety, and in ignorance of the more complex subtleties to which only Longus and the more discerning reader have access: ‘Daphnis and Chloe is told by its narrator as if it were a simpler and (...) more conventional story than it really is, and invites its reader to read it in the same way. One way to describe this textual duplicity is to think in terms of a surface “narrator's text” and a deeper “author's text”. We can conceive the narrator, as established by the prologue, as a distorting and simplifying lens between the story and us. As readers we effectively have the choice of accepting what we see through the lens or of correcting it and reading around the narrator.’ This type of separation of author and narrator is identifiable in Petronius’ Satyrica, in which the first-person narrator Encolpius who tells his story in hindsight is ridiculed and his narration destabilized by the hidden author who ‘is also listening, along with the reader, to Encolpius’ narrative—and along with the reader is smiling at it’. (shrink)